At Brown, Putin's actions seen having lengthy repercussions

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Robert Legvold told the students at a Brown University forum on Ukraine: “This is the most significant political development of your lives.”

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Thomas J. Morgan
Posted Mar. 5, 2014 @ 10:15 pm

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Robert Legvold eyed his audience at Brown University and told the students, “This is the most significant political development of your lives.”

Legvold, professor emeritus of political science at Columbia University, was part of a panel Wednesday evening that dissected the events swirling a half-world away in Ukraine, where Russian President Vladimir Putin has cast aside the warnings of Western nations and sent troops to occupy the Crimean Peninsula, Ukraine’s southernmost province.

Legvold said Putin’s fateful decision to issue marching orders will probably have a much more lasting legacy than the customary ups and downs of diplomacy between Russia and the United States.

“I can’t imagine two or three moves down the road what Putin’s move will be,” he said.

So many showed up for the event that Brown officials opened up two “spillover” rooms, where live TV coverage was piped in. Robert M. Locke, director of the university’s Watson Institute, promised there would be a series of such events in the near future.

Anna Lysyanskaya, professor of computer science at Brown and a native of Ukraine, said one of the more muddling aspects of the crisis is rooted in the recent history of that nation, which was sprung free of Soviet gravity when the USSR collapsed in 1991.

The breakup left Ukraine as a country equipped with nuclear weapons. But Ukraine didn’t want nuclear weapons, Lysyanskaya said. The country gave up the weapons in a 1994 pact declaring that in return for disarming, the United States, Great Britain and Russia would guarantee its security and integrity.

Russia has now apparently torn up that agreement with its troop movements and bellicose statements.

The “Euromaidan” events — a name inspired by the square in the capital city of Kiev that for months has been the focus of protests against the policies of the country’s former president, Viktor Yanukovych — have changed the character of the country, said Michael D. Kennedy, professor of sociology at Brown.

“The invasion of Ukraine by Putin on such absurd grounds” — the Russian president said among other things that he wanted to guarantee the safety of ethnic Russians who form a large proportion of the population of Crimea — “has created a new Ukraine,” said Kennedy, who called the invasion “criminal.”

Kennedy and his brother, Floyd Kennedy Jr., authored an article Wednesday in the British newspaper The Guardian.

In it, the brothers argued that the United States should take a sterner approach, but one short of a shooting war.

“Certain kinds of military action are also appropriate,” they wrote, “those that display NATO unity and resolve without upping the ante and guaranteeing war. Such measures could include establishing [aerial surveillance from the skies of eastern Poland by NATO] to monitor Ukrainian airspace, and/or conducting a no-warning air-defense exercise in Poland involving rapid deployments of non-Polish NATO air-defense capability to Polish skies, including the best fighter in the U.S. inventory, the F-22. By thus upping the ante, military risks for Russia would be dramatically increased and thus enter their calculations.

“Finally, and absolutely, all actors must work hard to distinguish between Putin’s criminal regime and the Russian people … . More and more Russians are standing up to Putin to say this ruins Russia.”

Linda Cook, a professor of political science at Brown, said, “I don’t think this is a win for Putin — it’s a crisis for Putin. He is taking great risks.”

Legvold predicted that a referendum on independence for Crimea now scheduled for the end of this month “will almost certainly pass.” He said the referendum should be postponed until after regular elections scheduled in May to replace the current interim government.

“The task has to be to stop the escalation that’s under way,” he said.